Can You Decipher All The Crazy Letters?

Can you read the words when the letters are all upside down or on their sides, and you can’t tell which way is front to back?

Crazy Letters is a party game by MindWare, in which each card shows words written in a difficult to decipher font and players must race against each other to solve each card.

Gameplay

Cards come in five different categories, and each card shows a word. The words are all in the correct order, but the fonts are designed to be extremely difficult to read. Letters might be backwards or on their sides, for example. H’s can look like y’s. Is that a p, d, or a b? You might not be able to tell which side is the start of the word and which is the end.

Players take turns rolling the die to determine which category of card to draw. If it’s wild, you get to choose which category. You then draw a card and place it face-up in the center of the table and players race to decipher it. Whoever figures out the word first takes the card. It’s now the next player’s turn to roll the die. The first person to collect twenty cards wins the game.

Review

Crazy Letters has a simple concept that is easy to teach. Not all cards are equally difficult, some will just click the moment you see them, but when you introduce the speed factor of trying to race other players to the solution first, then things can become more difficult. There are plenty of brain freezes to have and easy mistakes to make when under the pressure of trying to think faster than the other players.

The fact that you need to solve twenty cards to win ensures that even if there are a few easy cards that get drawn, you’ll still come up against enough tough ones to keep the game fun. We also enjoyed drawing a random number of cards from each category and shuffling them, so as not to be able to tell what category a word belonged to. This helped to increase the difficulty still further.

There is also a certain element of skill in the game as you slowly improve at reading the font. This can be fun and increase the competitiveness of the game, but can also mean that it’s harder for new players.

The graphic design on the cards is quite well done. The letters have been so creatively messed with. It’s fun to hear how people work through the cards and try to decipher them, and interesting to figure out the logic you use to reach the answer.

Crazy Letters is a different kind of party game and quite enjoyable. Since the card categories are already sorted in the box, set up time is one minute tops. Its mechanics are unusual, and that moment when a particularly tough card just clicks and you realize what it’s trying to spell, is quite satisfying.

Pros: Satisfying to solve tricky cards, speed element to the puzzle solving, graphic design, no set up time

Cons: Experienced players have advantage over new players